From conflict

to clarity

Creating positive change

Get into alignment

Make clear choices

Take focused action

Do you get stuck:

When a partner or family member isn’t listening to you or your best friend has unexplainably stopped talking to you?

When you can’t work out what to do in a particular situation?

When you are struggling to meet deadlines or targets?

It can be great to have help in these situations but often we just keep it bottled up inside or alternatively we moan about it to someone who reinforces our sense of injustice.

Sometimes it can be a huge relief to take these concerns to someone; to take time to pause and in that pause to think and feel and question the situation. To gain some new insight and to look at ways of moving forward.

Are you ready to take a step forward, to sort out a difficult situation, if so, then talk to me (even if you think that your situation is unsolvable).

I work with people in all sorts of conflict situations. Sometimes I use an individual process (coaching) and sometimes it is with two or more people at the same time (mediation).

Coaching

I was asked to coach a senior leader who was finding it impossible to say no to people who asked him to do tasks. As a consequence he was always missing deadlines; this meant other people got irritated with him and he felt both overwhelmed and bad about his behaviour.

Very quickly by using a mixture of talk and some embodied coaching, plus his willingness to talk in detail about his personal history, we hit on the reasons that he was unable to say no. These had to do with his personal history and a strong feeling of having to always please others. He decided on an approach to change this and together we looked at the requests in his inbox and he decided which ones to say no to; this all happened in our first meeting. By our second session he said that his life had changed for the better, he had met deadlines, said no more times and was less stressed. We spent that session and the subsequent one helping him reinforce the changes, deal with challenges and think about his future actions.

Mediation

A son in his 40s was estranged from his mother, there had been lots of issues that led to this point over many years.

The son approached me as he knew that his mother was ill and he wanted to see if there was a way of healing/repairing the relationship. I spent a couple of meetings with the son helping him get clear about what he wanted, looking at his expectations and considering what would happen if they weren’t met as well as if they were. We decided on a strategy for approaching his mother about mediation. She was willing and scared to meet with me and potentially with him. I met her by herself and then later held a meeting with them both together. It was a challenging process for them – old hurts don’t miraculously disappear – but they ended up speaking from places of vulnerability about what they wanted. They set up a way of ongoing communication that they both hoped would lead slowly to a richer relationship – which through my follow up, I know did.

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